Chapter 07 · AirwavesFM 93-07
Airwaves
Five kinds of trouble on their own clocks. The radio never owes you coordinates.
// FROM THE FILES — AIR WING, STATUS UNKNOWN
Somebody is still flying. FEMA that forgot to stop, a Guard unit that never got the recall, a rumour with a parachute. Net Control does not own the sky. We only report what we hear, at the precision this county allows: a pin, a circle of doubt, or a sector name and a prayer.
How announcements work
Every event type is announced at a precision this county configured:
| Mode | What you get | What the map draws |
|---|---|---|
| Exact | Coordinates. | A pin. |
| Fuzzed | A point plus a radius of doubt. | A circle around the fuzzed point, not the real one. |
| Encrypted | A sector name. “D7.” No numbers. | The sector outline. Nothing in the middle. |
The flyover is county-wide on purpose — a sound with no direction. The descending crate, the positional flyby, and the touchdown thump play only for people close enough that showing them the site would not leak it. The tracker’s distance arrow obeys the same rule as the marker.
// SAMPLE TRAFFIC
[AIR DROP] Incoming at (12500, 8900).
[AIR DROP] Incoming near (12480, 8922) — +/- 40 tiles.
[AIR DROP] Signal intercepted — Sector D7.
Military cordon! Stay back!
Is somebody out there?
Air Drop
A supply crate in a known drop zone (or a fallback rectangle if the zones are empty). The crate does not exist in dirt nobody is looking at; it arrives when someone reaches the ground. It is locked. Breach Supply Crate is a timed action, interrupted by damage and movement, timed by Net Control’s clock. First completed breach opens it for everyone — the timer is the ambush, not a personal lock. The contents are rolled at breach, not at spawn, so peeking the lid early shows nothing. Emptied crates leave on their own clock.
Military Cordon
A roadblock: soldiers, barricades, a truck. It has to sit on a road; a circle with no asphalt in it will never birth one. Cross the line and you are warned. Cross it again and the soldiers are not a costume. They are a role of their own — they fire on the line, not on a PvP flag. They do not belong to you. You cannot hire them.
Distress Beacon / Rescue
Civilians holed up, waiting for someone to walk them to an extraction point. Right-click a rescuee for Follow me / Wait. An ordinary wanderer will never offer that prompt; a free labour exploit would look like mercy. They are not in your party. They can die. Get them there.
Supply Contract
A settlement posts demand for a commodity at a premium. Anyone who sells into the depot shares the pool. This is how a quiet town pulls scrap out of the woods without posting a raid-me sign that says “we have guns and no food.”
Contest Party
A hostile group that turns up to fight you for an air drop. They are not raiders on a claim. They are the other team on the crate. If you heard the flyover, assume they did too.
Playing the scheduler
Trouble waits for the living and survives a box going dark mid-flight. If the lights go out while a crate is in the air, the air is still claimed when they come back. Do not camp a pin from last week.
The event tracker is a live distance arrow, not a quest log. Use it with the world map. Turn RZSN markers off only when you are trying to remember how to be lost.